Business needs to learn to see separate challenges as part of the whole

To thrive in the future, business must look to nature and make a paradigm shift from separated to interconnected thinking

Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist found that the left brain, dominant in western culture, focuses on separate parts of problems. But we also need to engage the broader wisdom of the right brain. Photograph: Tetra Images / Alamy/Alamy

Businesses are facing economic, social and environmental challenges. Globalisation, digitisation and pressure on finite natural resources are all transformational drivers. Current approaches to business no longer suffice in these volatile, transformative times.

Many talk about a paradigm shift being required in business and beyond. A shift in business mentality, culture, values and leadership is now upon us as organisations seek ways to adapt, survive and thrive in turbulent times.

Current business models and mentalities are rooted in the post-industrial era. They have helped drive maximisation and scale, founded on a take, make, waste philosophy. Post-industrial models view business as a machine where assets (human, natural or manufactured) are sweated with economies of scale, bringing increased profits through reduced production costs. Functions are separated into different departments forming silos; separating the whole into disparate units to aid maximisation and cost reduction. Top-down command-and-control hierarchies enable effective management of the units.

This atomisation, while bringing economies of scale, can erode the benefits of economies of scope: interlinking relationships, open resource and information flows that facilitate improvements in innovation, collaboration and resilience. Relationships are the lifeblood of business and yet economies of scale, unbalanced by economies of scope, can degrade the inter- and intra-relations essential within and across organisational boundaries. Post-industrial business thinking has led to organisations often being treated as lifeless hierarchic machines made up of building blocks that can be rationalised, measured and monitored for improved efficiency and effectiveness.

Why does business behave in this way? Here's the science

Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist explores left-brain dominance in our western culture. The left brain, according to McGilchrist's findings, focuses on parts of the problem, decontextualising and abstracting the problem in a closed system. This of course, helps us analyse and find a solution to that problem. But this is a solution in its isolated closed system, not in a living, emergent, volatile business environment. The right brain is what interconnects, provides living world context, views things in an open system and develops a broad understanding. It is both the knowledge of the parts (left brain) and wisdom of the whole (right brain) that we need for complete and proper problem understanding and correct solution creation. To quote Einstein: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant." For McGilchrist, "we have created a society that honours the servant but has forgotten the gift".

Left-brain dominance has its roots in a reductionist philosophy that came long before today's prevailing business paradigm. Descartes and Newton, among others, helped sow the seeds of reductionism: the view that the behaviour of the whole system can be explained in terms of the behaviour of their constituent parts. This atomisation of complex, interconnected systems greatly assisted our understanding of science and the development of technologies that still benefit us today. Management and monitoring approaches have enabled great strides in efficiency of operations, aided our understanding of parts of business and helped us to analyse, quantify and control. However, a focus on measuring atomised parts of the system needs to be adequately balanced with an understanding of the inter-relationship of the parts and the wider system context. Intuitively, we know that life is not simply made up of building blocks that can be rationalised, measured and monitored for improved efficiency and effectiveness.

Beyond the left brain – systems thinking

Systems thinking deals in terms of interconnections, patterns and processes rather than separate units. It recognises the interconnected nature of business and views the whole system as greater than the sum of its parts. Whilst reductionism helps with the understanding of isolated parts, systems thinking helps us understand and deal with complexity and change by taking inspiration from the natural world around us, which has been dealing with dynamic change for billions of years.

One of the founding fathers of systems thinking was Gregory Bateson, who focused on the relationship between things and the importance of context. He said: "The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."

All living systems are interconnected, communicate with one another and share resources across their boundaries. In nature, an ecosystem generates no net waste, as one species' waste becomes another species' food, with matter and energy transforming and cycling continually through the web of life.

Businesses of the future recognise the importance of the business ecosystem from a process perspective (industrial symbiosis, for instance) and a people perspective (co-creation and shared innovation, for instance). Companies of the future are ones that view their organisation as a living, vibrant, emergent organism interacting within a living, vibrant, emergent ecosystem. The resilience of the organisation is interdependent on the resilience of its business ecosystem. This brings a shift from linear, atomised, supply-chain thinking to interconnected, holistic, ecosystem thinking.

As we shift towards a new paradigm, we will fuse current learning with intelligent awareness of nature's wisdom. A business inspired by nature is one that is not limited to reducing its negative impact on society and the environment; it is a business that creates value for the economy, environment and society in a wholesome, life-enhancing way. A net-positive business works with the grain of nature not against it.

The answers to many of today's pressing challenges can be found all around us if we choose to re-ignite our senses and re-establish our vital bond with nature.